Johnny E. Williams

What happens when sociologists ignore the whiteness of their discipline? How do anti-Black assumptions and practices inform sociology? These are just two of the many questions this project contends with regarding sociology’s continuous effort to dismiss blackness, even though the very attempt to dismiss blackness simultaneously signals and reaffirms its epistemic and analytical importance within the discipline. This project exposes how mainstream sociological traditions conceal their foundational anti-Black methodologies, epistemologies, and scientific practices. In particular, the analysis shows how academics deploy the rhetoric of “objectivity” to sideline, defuse, and disregard critical interventions that contest Eurocentric paradigms. By deploying these exclusionary strategies, the field engages in epistemicide, methodically wiping out alternative intellectual traditions that challenge its whiteness. To counter this erasure, the study proposes a radical shift in paradigm, moving beyond white sociology toward an emancipated discipline that affirms Black dignity and promotes a revolutionary, disruptive framework.